In the early hours of September 30, 1938, Neville Chamberlain, Édouard Daladier, Adolf Hitler, and Benito Mussolini signed the Munich Agreement, allowing Nazi Germany to annex the Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia. Czechoslovak representatives were not permitted in the room. Chamberlain returned to London proclaiming 'peace for our time'; within a year, Hitler had swallowed the rest of Czechoslovakia and invaded Poland.
The agreement was the culmination of a frantic diplomatic scramble to avert war over Hitler's demand for the Sudetenland, a border region of Czechoslovakia with a large ethnic German population. Mussolini proposed the conference; Chamberlain and Daladier, desperate to avoid another European war so soon after the last, agreed to Hitler's terms almost in full. Czechoslovak diplomats waited in an adjoining room, informed of their country's fate only after the fact.
Chamberlain flew home to Heston Aerodrome and, waving the signed paper, told cheering crowds he had secured 'peace for our time,' quoting nearly the exact words used by Disraeli after the Congress of Berlin. Winston Churchill, then a backbench critic, called it 'a total and unmitigated defeat.'
The promise proved hollow almost immediately. German troops occupied the rest of Czechoslovakia by March 1939, and Hitler invaded Poland that September, triggering the Second World War. Munich became lasting shorthand for the perils of appeasement, a word invoked by statesmen ever since to justify standing firm against aggression.
Key people: Neville Chamberlain, Adolf Hitler, Édouard Daladier, Benito Mussolini